The truth about the real estate business is there are not enough transactions to go around. If you were to take the total number of closed sides each year and divide them equally between all of the real estate agents and brokers in the business . . . well, everyone would starve.
I remember years ago, when I moved my office from one part of town to another, all the other brokers were friendly. They acted like they were glad to see me and said things like, ‘there’s plenty of business for everybody.’ Then, of course, they went home to stick pins their voodoo dolls and hope for my demise — because there’s NOT enough business for everyone. I knew it; they knew it. If I was going to make it I was going to have to get more than my share. . . and that meant I was going to have to take it away from them.
Getting more than your share . . . more listings, more buyers, more sales . . . that’s what Help-U-Sell is all about. It’s a strategy for getting more and ultimately for becoming a dominant force in your local marketplace.
More. It’s basic business. All businesses, from the corner grocery store to the Fortune 500 multi-national live and die by their ability to get more and do more. In business school we learn there are two measures of success in business: Market Share and Profitability. Market Share is about getting more. Profitability is about being efficient.
In days gone by, doing more usually meant having more people, more feet on the street, a bigger operation. But people are expensive, and building market share by hiring more and more people usually results in low profitability.
That’s why businesses over the past 20 years have focused on downsizing and on automation and systems. Nobody wants a pink slip, but let’s face it: General Motors builds a much better, safer, more fuel efficient automobile today with far fewer people than it did 20 years ago.
Sadly, the evolution of business has had little impact on the ordinary real estate world, where success is usually defined as having more salespeople than your competitors. The broker’s job is not to sell more and more real estate but rather to recruit more and more agents (who in theory will take care of all that selling). With per agent productivity hovering somewhere below five deals a year and commission splits still in the stratosphere, you might recruit the entire population of, say, Washington State to be your salesforce and still not make a profit!
It doesn’t have to be that way. Just as other businesses have evolved to where doing more is a function of fewer people using systems to manage an ever increasing flow of business, the real estate business can evolve. With the Help-U-Sell consumer offering and operating system, you can get more and do more with fewer people and lower cost.
Last year, I stopped into Chino Hills, California and saw Patrick Wood. He’s in an attractive 750 square foot Help-U-Sell office in a strip center. It’s a small operation: just him, his assistant, Val and a couple of buyer agents. But, together, they routinely out produce whole offices of ordinary real estate agents. While the competition is closing offices and consolidating, Pat and his team are focused on getting more, doing more and building a business worth having.
Help-U-Sell is simple. It is a handful of carefully constructed systems that work together to produce a predictable result: a successful business – one that does more than its share of transactions. The systems are vastly different from what’s common in the ordinary real estate world, and the two simply don’t mix. Evaluating your Help-U-Sell business on the criteria of your agent-oriented competitors is like trying to tell how tall you are by stepping on the scale.
It’s 2011. It’s once again time to know who we are, what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. Simplify. Focus on systems: systems for generating leads, systems for capturing, incubating and managing those leads, systems for staffing, for listing and for managing transactions. And remember: it’s all about more.
By the way, Realty Trac calculates the ‘discount’ by comparing the average sale price of foreclosures in the State with the average sale price of non-foreclosed properties. It’s not a perfect method (kinda like comparing the juice of this pile of apples, oranges and lemons with the juice of this other pile of apples, oranges and lemons), but the result still indicates that sellers with equity in the top foreclosure states have monumental competition. Still, if your house is worth $200,000 and you have to price it at $175,000 to sell so you can buy your dream home (which happens to be an REO) valued at $400,000 but priced at $300,000, I think you’re way ahead. Where else can you give up $25,000 and gain $100,000? No stock market I’ve ever heard of. 